Bill Browder

News

The former banker claims Vladimir Putin runs Russia like a crime syndicate. He should know: corrupt officials seized his assets and stole $230m. His lawyer was beaten to death in jail. And now sinister text messages warn he might be next

Bill Browder was a Red Diaper baby whose grandfather was a leader of the American Communist Party. But when he rebelled by investing in Russia's capitalist revolution, he found himself in the black - both financially and personally.

Much of Bill Browder’s new book, Red Notice, “reads like a detective novel”, says Luke Harding in The Guardian. But while stranger than fiction in many parts, his chilling memoir is anything but fantasy. The fund manager, who reinvented himself as an anti-Putin campaigner following the death of his lawyer in a Russian jail, is on permanent alert for danger.

Hedge fund manager William "Bill" Browder was once the largest foreign investor in Russia, making his investors piles of money, but if he had to do it all over again, he never would have entered the country in the first place.

"I now understand how completely naive I was to think that as a foreigner I was somehow immune to the barbarity of the Russian system," Browder said.

It was 7:45 a.m. on Nov. 17, 2009, when my phone rang. It was my lawyer, Eduard, who had a horrible message to relay: “Bill, Sergei is dead.”

Sergei Magnitsky was one of my lawyers in Russia. He’d been arrested and detained in Moscow for nearly a year after exposing Russian government corruption. I knew that he had been mistreated, but the fact that he’d been killed was beyond my worst nightmare.

The founder of The Hermitage Fund made, lost, and made a fortune investing in Russia. Then he learned the truth about doing business in Moscow.

Bill Browder, a grandson of the onetime leader of the American Communist Party, embraced capitalism and ran the largest hedge fund in Russia—until officials there allegedly took control of his firm in 2007 for the purpose of stealing a quarter of a billion dollars from the Russian treasury. When Browder’s lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, reported the theft, Magnitsky was arrested by the same officials he’d claimed had stolen the money. After Magnitsky died in prison, Browder turned from hedge-fund hustling to human-rights campaigning, as he describes in his new book, Red Notice. Here, he shares his views on Russia’s current economic and geopolitical plight.

Bill Browder has been talking for almost half an hour about an ordeal that has turned him from high-profile hedge fund manager to human rights activist. In an interview with HFMWeek, the 50-year-old American-born British citizen explains how he has become, in his view, one of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s biggest enemies.

I first met Bill Browder when he came to tell The Post’s editorial board that its criticism of Vladi­mir Putin was all wrong. It was the early 2000s, and Putin was persecuting independent media and their owners and flattening the republic of Chechnya. Browder, then the head of the largest Western investment fund in Russia, argued that we were missing the fact that Putin was a reformer who was replacing Russia’s post-Soviet chaos with liberal capitalism and the rule of law.

Browder was drastically — and, in the end, tragically — wrong. In 2005, Putin turned on him, and he was banned from Russia. Then his companies were seized and used by corrupt officials to steal $230 million in tax receipts. When a young lawyer hired by Browder exposed the scheme, he was arrested by those same officials and so brutally mistreated that he died in his prison cell.

LBC likes to tell us it’s ‘Leading Britain’s Conversation’, though in the case of weekday pre-lunch presenter James O’Brien you’ll have to sit through a series of bombastic monologues from the host before any punters get a word in edgeways. O’Brien knows everything, and he doesn’t mind telling you. Still, I understand that running a talk show is no job for timid introverts who might burst into tears if callers start giving them a hard time. The trick is pretending to listen sympathetically while being ready to drop the guillotine without compunction (after all, these people aren’t your friends, they’re just statistics for the business plan). Anyway, after last Thursday’s programme I could forgive O’Brien a lot, even the number of times he says ‘if you will’, though largely because he’d brought a guest into the studio.

Some call him Vladimir Putin's enemy number one. Bill Browder set up a massively successful investment fund in Russia, then discovered that government officials had ripped him off to the tune of more than $200 million. He left, but one of his lawyers, Sergei Magnitsky, was seized and jailed. And not just jailed, but beaten to death.